A Return to Pakistan and Patience

Flying into Islamabad in the middle of the night, I braced myself for the upcoming rituals of customs and baggage. “Patience,” I kept repeating to myself, as I descended the steps from the plane and onto a bus crowded with other passengers, including a lot of sleepy children. However arduous it was going to be for me, it was certainly going to be worse for all those mothers.

I have not been to Islamabad, or even Pakistan, in over two and a half years. After the killing of Osama bin Laden by American special forces last year, visas were hard to come by. Still, I managed to get a visa last week, just in time to accept an unusual invitation.

It came in an email just after Christmas. Former Pakistani president Pervez Musharraf, who has been living in self-imposed exile in London and Dubai since leaving politics in 2008. But Musharraf planned to stage a return to both active politics and Pakistan with a high-profile flight into Karachi planned at the end of January. I, along with a number of other journalists, was invited to buy a ticket for what promised to be a dramatic return.

After all, I had been in Karachi on October 18, 2007, when Benazir Bhutto returned from her own self-imposed exile to contest elections. The streets were jammed with hundreds of thousands of cheering supporters. As Bhutto’s convoy crawled along its route, I waited under an overpass. Realizing she was still more than an hour away, I returned to my hotel to file my report.

I saw the explosions happen, at the very spot I had been standing earlier, on the television in my room. 139 people died, 450 others were injured.

Bhutto herself was unhurt, though when I interviewed her two days later, she complained that her ears were still ringing from the blasts. Still, she vowed to carry on. And she did, until she was assassinated just over two months later on December 27th.

In Pakistan’s tumultuous and dramatic political stage, the ghost of Bhutto undeniably haunted Musharraf’s planned return. Even as the preparations grew more intense the government, (headed by Bhutto’s widower Asif Ali Zardari ), made it clear Musharraf would be arrested if he returned, on charges relating to the death of Bhutto.

Musharraf’s officials insisted the former president was not deterred. He admitted he knew the risk but planned to go anyway. So I booked a flight to Dubai, still not certain he would actually take the gamble, not certain I would see the former president who seized power in a coup return to try to cloak himself in the mantle of democracy.

On Friday, as I flew from London, Musharraf’s top advisers did the talking for him. He would not return at this time, they said; instead he would wait for better conditions inside the country.

That does not mean there aren’t plenty of other stories of political intrigue to tell from inside Pakistan. There is the continuing power struggle between the government, the military and the judiciary that is threatening to destabilize the country even further. There is the deteriorating state of relations between the US and Pakistan, exacerbated by American drone strikes, a cross border attack that left Pakistani soldiers dead and of course, the daring American mission to kill Osama bin Laden.

US Defense Secretary Leon Panetta’s admission that a Pakistani doctor helped the CIA by collecting evidence of bin Laden’s presence in Pakistan probably will not help. Nor will Panetta’s thinly veiled criticism of Pakistani officials for holding the doctor in custody pending potential charges of treason.

And so that is why Musharraf’s change of plans did not deter me, it simply meant buying the ticket that brought me to Islamabad in the middle of the night. Now I can only hope it will not take too long for Musharraf to reimburse me for the flight that never happened.

“Patience,” I say to myself.